Creating my Sinatra project

I really enjoyed working on this project. I feel like being able to manipulate and customize CSS styling really helped put a personal touch on the project. I did a lot of googling looking for different button animations, layout styles and even color palettes. Every time I made a new page, I would put a different style of button or layout to it so that I could visualize and test it out. Once I had the project mostly finished, I picked a style of button and went through and matched all my pages’ stylings.

I made full use of tux and pry to test my pages. I have to confess that during my first project, I really didn’t use pry all that much but this time around, it was indispensable. I can’t imagine testing my pages and code without it. I used it to check the data and parameters being passed from page to page as well as to make sure my API was giving me the data I needed.

Setting up my API was another big challenge, and honestly, it did feel a bit overwhelming at first. My project involved being able to search a database of animes and then display that details on a specific anime to the user, and thus I needed an API that showed data that was detailed enough for this use. The first API I found did work, however it was quite limited in its querying capabilities and did also showed very limited data on the anime it did contain. Much of the data was outdated as well. Thanks to a friend’s suggestion, I was able to find a much more intricate API and with much more detailed documentation. Many of the APIs I had been looking at suffered from little to no documentation, so the extra reading really helped with the implementation.

Another issue I had a bit of trouble with was the positioning of elements on pages. I did a lot of googling for specific attributes such as margins, padding, and positions. W3schools was an immense asset for documentation on how css and html attributes worked as well as for examples on their implementation.

Honestly, I really had a lot of fun working on this web app and am planning on releasing it publicly as well as add much more user functionality in the future. I am very excited to see how much I can add to this and to see how my project will evolve in the future.